Weekend Edition: 5-1

Blog Headline of the Week

• A New Argument In Favor of Cameras in the Courtroom: Bloggers Suck

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes

• The lack of translated literature in the English-speaking world is “a new kind of iron curtain we have constructed around ourselves.” (The Literary Saloon)
• Solitude and Leadership: If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts (“Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.”) (idealawg)
• While it might be a lovely sentiment to believe that religions are different paths to the same wisdom, it “is untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous.” (Arts & Letters Daily)

Bookish Linkage

• Margaret Atwood speaks on censorship in receiving the American PEN Literary Service Award.
• Green Apple Books is using its blog to republish from its email newsletter an occasional series of original essays by writers called “Why I Read.”
• Those wacky Australians. When reports surfaced that a cookbook recipe erroneously told users to add “freshly ground black people,” sales of the book quadrupled.
• When China Miéville won the Arthur C. Clarke award, the UK’s most prestigious science fiction prize, this week he did so for the third time — and it’s even a book I’ve read.
• The LA Times Book Prizes were announced last week. I’d read only the winner of the award for first fiction.
• The shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has been announced. Brodeck is the only one I’ve read that made it from the longlist so, of course, it’s my favorite for the prize, given to fiction by a living author which has been translated into English and published in the UK in the last year.
• Philip K. Dick’s “Exegesis”, a journal he wrote documenting and analyzing “visions” he experienced in 1974, is scheduled to be released in two volumes, with the first coming next year.

Nonbookish Linkage

• Let’s see, it’s a “waste of a perfectly good dimension,” “adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience” and “creates nausea and headaches.” I wonder what Roger Ebert really thinks about 3-D movies?
• Language courses developed for the U.S. Foreign Service before 1989 are now available online for free. (Boing Boing)
• If you’re not reading io9’s “Ask A Physicist” series, you should be. The questions are great and, quite frankly, straightforward but legitimate head scratchers.

Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop